


family of spies

by blueincandescence



Series: all's fair in love and cold war [6]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Found Family, Gen, lord knows I love a quirky side character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 00:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: In which UNCLE celebrates a newfound legitimacy and impending move to NYC, while Gaby reflects on the nature of her very personal relationships at the center of her very professional work.





	family of spies

**Author's Note:**

> This in medias res one-shot takes place after "in soviet russia, landmine disarm you," in which we learn that Gaby and Illya are very much in violation of the UNCLE Code of Conduct forbidding fraternization, and "language and other lessons," in which Illya is called back to the KGB for an indefinite amount of time.
> 
> [Insert fic I haven't written: Gaby is taken off active duty as her punishment for violating the Code of Conduct. Her affair with Illya is the perfect KGB excuse to pull out of UNCLE and the CIA makes similar threats. UNCLE almost crashes to the ground. Except Gaby works day and night to fix everything—#1. She convinces the KGB she's no actual romantic threat, just a spy on a coldhearted mission to keep Illya happy with UNCLE. #2. She finds a way to make UNCLE a clandestine but legitimate spy organization. Because Gaby Teller is just that good.]
> 
> Sorry about my whacky timeline (http://blueincandescence.tumblr.com/post/152841155880/alls-fair-in-love-and-cold-war), folks. Please enjoy(?) this character rumination on the delicacy of building a family out of spies.

10 JULY 1964

  
Gaby views the party through the lens of Illya’s modified Exakta Varex. Finger hovering on the shutter-release button, she roves over streamers hastily draped along rows of covered typewriters. The desks in the secretarial pool have been pushed back into a semicircle. They are ringed by string lights that lend the shabby London office an intimacy Gaby cannot dislodge from her chest. The soft glow reminds her of Christmastime and glass ornaments, banished loneliness and her terror of delicate things.

Seven months ago, UNCLE was three operatives and a director who spent day and night with a telephone glued to his ear, cashing in every favor he had in exchange for piecemeal aid. Now the most pivotal, least recognized figures from Second World War intelligence and their protégés are all under his employ.

Tonight they are getting tipsy on bubbling champagne and effervescent chatter like V-E Day has come round again. After weeks on the brink of obsolescence, UNCLE is saved. An authorization document endorsed by the Secretary-General exists in two places: deep in the vaults of the United Nations Secretariat Building and behind mechanized locks in this rented seventh-floor office on Victoria Street.

Gaby snaps a photograph of Marge Perkins throwing back the elongated line of her neck to instigate a shared cackle among her fellow Bletchley Park alumnae, who Solo affectionately nicknamed the Code Coven. Solo is also responsible for Arnold Dunham’s moniker of Teddy Roosevelt, but the likeness is so apparent it is hardly worth taking the credit. Though he does. Teddy has his hand on San Juan Hill, also known as Central and South America specialist Raquel Sorín’s backside. Gaby documents evidence of their affair to assist Solo in his bid to bankrupt Illya one twenty-pound wager at a time. Fresh-faced Cecily Broadhurst and the equally youthful typists lose cover girl poses to giggles Gaby enters into the record. UNCLE may be bureaucratizing at a rocket’s pace but laughter remains permissible.

Once the camera is spotted, Gaby is compelled to take photographs of Waverly shaking hands with people he sees every day, some of whom he has worked with for decades, like he is a visiting dignitary. In each photograph, Waverly wears the half-dazed grin that has split his face since the good news broke last week. Near Waverly but never with him, newly appointed Deputy Director Xiaojian Wu circles the room with her hands clasped in front of her, composed expression giving away nothing of the enormous burden she has taken onto her narrow shoulders.

Citing limited film, Gaby begs off portrait duty to resume her hunt for images that might unfurrow the crease in Illya’s brow, which she anticipates will be etched all the deeper for their uncertain separation. Perkins and others wave Gaby over, chorusing orders to join the party. Gaby presses the shutter down on beckoning arms and smiles. Her hope is that the finished print will emote warmth and welcome, though she fears her attempts will leave Illya with nothing more than out-of-focus blurs to squint at. His photographs, even the utilitarian ones taken for cover or surveillance, always seem to capture something ineffable just beyond her reach.

She has to trust he will take the rolls of film she spent not as wasted resources but as penitential offerings. He left her, so she hardened her heart. Only to learn he was called away to answer for her. The very least she owes him is proof of how much she misses him.

•

  
The champagne coats her tongue strangely, but Gaby holds her flute aloft all the same. 

“One week ago today, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement became a recognized multilateral organization.” Waverly toasts, “To your fine, fine work.”

In honor of her literal blood, sweat, and tears — in order of how much she resents shedding them, Gaby downs her glass. She is rewarded with a, “Bully for you, Teller,” and a refill from Dunham.

“I’ve made no secret of my ambition to make our ‘N’ stand for something loftier, but I suppose we’ll have to make do with an address in the East Forties and a stunning view of the Secretariat Building.”

A cheer goes up. Gaby longs to have seen Solo’s face when he found out UNCLE HQ will be trading in London fog for New York City lights.

On a note of seriousness, Waverly says, “It is fortunate in these troubled times to have a Buddhist at the helm of the United Nations, a man who understands that global threats require global cooperation.”

Back-channeled as Secretary-General U Thant’s authorization must be, it guarantees the two things UNCLE needs to flourish: status and funding. The world's major intelligence organizations have fallen in line. As of close of business that afternoon, the last two significant contracts — fine print magnified, tripwires unclipped — have been signed, sealed, and delivered to Washington and Moscow, respectively.

UNCLE's prodigal sons could return at any time.

Quite the coup de maître considering that just over forty-five days ago the KGB swore to never work with UNCLE again on accusations of plotting its agent's defection. Taking deep offense to UNCLE's assurances to the contrary, the CIA swore the same. In the forty-five days of her probation for violating the UNCLE Code of Conduct, Gaby has weathered a threat of deportation, had her resignation emphatically denied, led a KGB psychoanalyst to believe she is a self-serving jezebel thus no true threat to Illya's loyalties, and unearthed the key to saving UNCLE buried in legalese: _The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security._

“To Article 99 of the Charter of the United Nations.” Waverly finds Gaby with his toast and the room takes another hearty drink.

She has not hidden her professional pride and personal satisfaction at a job impeccably done. This crowd has their secrets, of course, but the depth of their investment in UNCLE is not something they have kept from each other.

More bottles are passed around as the staff take up a chant of, “Speech, speech!”

Waverly holds out his arms in helpless wonder. “Haven’t you heard enough of me prattling on about my mad dream?”

“Yes,” grumps Major General Salman Khan, UNCLE’s highest-ranking retiree. As usual, the General looks nonplussed to be considered so delightful a wit.

“Point well-taken, I won’t dawdle. The dream was always this: the free exchange of intelligence for the betterment and protection of humanity without regard to nationality  — absolutely bonkers. I’d like to take this opportunity to forgive any of you who ever informed on me behind my back. I understand completely.”

The chuckles are a moment for Waverly to compose himself, one hand worrying his bottom lip.

Quieter now, he says, “That dream isn’t my dream anymore. Or even our dream. It’s reality, it’s this reality — the world we live in needs us. That’s a heavy burden. One way or another, I’ve been in the trenches with every one of you. So I cannot express how much of a comfort it is knowing you’ll be the ones doing all the lifting.”

Gaby laughs into her champagne, grateful for Waverly’s irreverence.

In front of her, UNCLE’s resident septuagenarian, Madame Philippa Bernard, dabs her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. Gaby hesitates to place a hand on Madame’s shoulder; a woman who has survived two World Wars and still fights to stave off a third requires no meager comforts. Her fingers wind back around the stem of her glass, and Gaby is reminded, once more, of her true nature — that of an emotional coward.

Waverly raises his glass high. “To old friends and young. To the friends no longer with us and the ones we'll see again.” Wire- and water-rimmed eyes meet hers. “To the indelible — ” His voice catches and Gaby’s throat constricts in sympathy.

She is saved from feeling by an adoptive countryman once more. “Oh, bugger all, you pompous twit,” Perkins cries, drink sloshing over the side of her glass as she boosts her long arm. “To family!”

There is a bitter note to the champagne Gaby could not have articulated had she anyone to tell.

•

After months of spying on the moneyed elite, Gaby finds herself appreciative of a party where she can sit on the table with the record player and curate the joie de vivre. Given the age this crowd skews, she follows up Frank Sinatra with Ella Fitzgerald.

Chin cocked, she notices the familiarity with which a pair from the Code Coven fall into a close-leaning two-step and wonders how many relationships will be emboldened by the substantial amendments to the complex engagements clause she has negotiated.

Dessert wine has followed champagne, and she sips idly. Beside her on a cart, a sheet cake proclaims in swirling red icing, ‘We thought you were off your rocker!’ The bakery down the way did up a modest caricature of a silver-haired man seated in a rocking chair with a white flag planted deep into a splotchy blue and green Earth. No one looking, Gaby dips a finger into vanilla cream.

The man of the hour is in the corner, leaned over Madame’s chair to pat her paper-thin hand. It is unlikely she will make the move to New York City.

Gaby doesn’t know what to make of it herself. She’s forged a new life in London; Gabriela Schmidt has dance lessons, a subscription to the theatre, and friends besides. In America, she will be a German-born Englishwoman — an immigrant twice over in a city so large they call it the Big Apple. It’s an adventure, really. She supposes she is pleased.

Choosing to acknowledge her staring, Waverly excuses himself from Madame. Still, he takes his time coming over. Even then, Waverly flips through the records stacked up on the table before glancing over, as if Gaby’s presence has only just registered. “You’re still here? I’d thought you’d run off with Broadhurst and her lot.” It has been a hard six weeks.

“That lot didn’t sleep at their desks for weeks to make this celebration possible,” Gaby huffs. She may have been demoted to glorified secretary for the span of her probation, but she accomplished a hell of a lot on top of memorizing how the whole staff takes their coffees.

Waverly looks from her icing-tipped finger to the agitated swing of her Mary Janes, lip tucked up. “I only meant that surely you have better plans than to spend Friday night with the geriatric set.”

He has cast her in the role of little girl in a party dress asking if, pretty please, can’t she stay with the grown-ups? No such occasion exists in Gaby’s murky childhood memories; she must have seen something like it in a film.

At her lack of reaction, Waverly switches her part to moody teen: “You’ll have two months to say goodbye,” he confides, and takes a swipe at the icing himself.

“I expect continuity in New York,” Gaby tells him. “Legally, I am Gabriela Schmidt, naturalized British citizen.”

“Oh, yes,” Waverly assures her. “That’s for posterity.” Finally getting around to addressing her as an adult, he adds, “And there are options. The London office will stay open. Philippa has suggested she return to Paris to open a satellite office there. Various others will follow, along with a significant bolstering of safe houses and drop-off sites, etcetera.” He stops gesticulating and meets Gaby’s eye. “The point is, you aren’t obliged to come to New York.” Turning back to the record stacks, Waverly says, “Of course, I very much hope that you do.”

Gaby will take her choices where she can get them, but her mind is already made up on this one. “I intend to. I am still the second largest private investor in UNCLE. We’ve taken the organization public, true, but I won’t be sidelined.”

Waverly shoots her an appreciative smile, sliding out an album. “How would you feel about playing something a bit more recent? Track seven, if you please.”

Ben E. King, “Stand By Me,” 1961. By design, Gaby is reminiscing on her recruitment as Waverly leads her out onto the makeshift dance floor. 1961. Her worst summer since the war — the Wall, her foster father’s passing, a career-halting injury, and self-inflicted isolation. Enter one Alexander Waverly, patron of the arts cum British intelligence officer. She would have done anything. He asked for nothing more or less than her life.

Giving her a twirl, Waverly pulls her into a box-step and squeezes the hand he holds. “Nice to have you back again, Agent Teller.”

She was reinstated yesterday, while he was on a red-eye to New York. Gaby had come in that morning to an expensive bottle of gin and a short note of praise on her desk.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Very professional,” Waverly says, radiating humility.

Neither of them has been at their best of late.

“This is a professional agency,” Gaby quips, finding it in herself to sound game. “We couldn’t be scrappy upstarts forever.”

“No, no.” Waverly sighs. “It was quite a lark, though.” They sway for a while to the crooning, fond remembrances playing over their smiles. “It felt like full circle approving their contracts this afternoon. Solo’s and Kuryakin’s,” he clarifies as if he needed to. “Still, I shudder to think what they'll get up to now six continents are in play.”

Suppressing a grin, Gaby chides, “You mean you didn’t get Antarctica on board?”

“That damned penguin lobby,” Waverly spits, so serious Gaby laughs.

She leans against Waverly’s shoulder, briefly. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Us, if you don’t mind.”

“I appreciate being appreciated,” she lets him know. Clearer communication was on her Checklist for Appropriate Conduct Readiness.

“Well, if I take all the credit, I have to take all the blame,” Waverly reasons. He pats her side before sending her off into another twirl, New York seeming more like an adventure already.

•

The party is still in swing when Gaby retreats to her office to gather her purse and Illya’s camera. Across the hall, the office he shares with Solo is closed up tight. Gaby has spent so much time absorbing the emptiness that it has taken on a haunted quality.

With the benefit of knowing she has won her boys back, Gaby can appreciate that Illya and Solo might be relieved to move into posher — though no doubt less charming — arrangements. While cramped, both of their workspaces are meticulous, especially when compared to her own, but still manage to be diametrically opposed.

Solo’s is nothing short of a tribute to himself. Even his fountain pens, gleaming metallic and stored in velvet boxes, are top-of-the-market. A triptych hangs over the wall behind his sweeping desk chair, each piece in a different mode but painted by the same artist. Someday, Gaby will lull him into a conversation so skillfully composed he won’t even realize when he admits they are his work.

Gaby comes to stand behind Illya’s desk, draping her hand along the top of his chair the way she might if his broad shoulders were leaning there. The office has two walls of glass, but she knows how to conceal touch at every angle. Gaby sits in his chair, so elevated that she only toes the linoleum. She spreads her hands over the spartan top of Illya’s desk. His pens are far less flashy than Solo’s but field-tested for reliability.

From the corner of the desk, Gaby takes hold of a two-sided silver frame. On the left, a color portrait of a well-aged blonde wearing pearls. On the right, a black and white photo of the same women in her prime, gloved fingers curled around the hand of a lanky boy with her coloring. The boy looks up at his mother in solemn adoration. Gaby puts the frame back in its place before she commits some heinous schoolgirl act like tracing a heart over that cherubic face.

She knows there will be no photographs of her if she searches through Illya’s desk again, not even beneath the false bottom drawer where he keeps his stash of bugs and Soviet paraphernalia. Gaby has often caught Illya taking photographs of her, but she has never seen the results anything but fresh-printed. It is a melancholy thought, but Illya is both paranoid and practical enough to destroy any evidence of her.

One more reason to know that getting caught was her fault and her fault alone. Through fabric stretched over the shallow valley between her breasts, Gaby worries the ring held there by a silver chain. The past is not a place she often lets herself long for. In this situation, she has done what she can to make things right.

Gaby settles back in Illya’s chair. To hear office gossip tell it, UNCLE’s new HQ is going to be nothing short of show-stopping. It will be a longer walk for the boys to throw spitballs at each other, but she feels assured that not everything has to change. The end of one era, the start of another. Gaby runs her necklace between two fingers, allowing the ring to peek out at her collar.

A soft knock precipitates Xiaojian slipping into the office. She made herself scarce around the time that things got chummy only to reappear at less emotional intervals, few the wiser. Gaby doubts that at any point she caught the infamous Hong Kong spy on film.

Skipping the pleasantries Gaby has noticed Xiaojian grits her teeth through, she pronounces, “I believe I will learn a lot from you in New York.” In the three weeks since Xiaojian arrived in London, Gaby already has.

“In New York, I will have as much to learn as you,” is Xiaojian’s even reply, before she segues straight to her purpose. “I saw you forgive Alexander. This is necessary.”

The internal battle raging in Gaby between resenting the older woman’s directives and desperately seeking her approval has lowered to a simmer. “I know.” She does not have to reach far to muster the conviction to say, “There are more important things at stake than personal relationships.”

The press of Xiaojian’s bow lips reveals that answer to be incorrect. “In my training, I was taught that personal relationships were a liability. My sisters and I were to have no attachments in front of the mission. Not even our professional relationships. Unburdening myself from this mentality has been complex.”

Gaby’s eyes dart to the picture frame and the boy who, only a few years later, would be taken from his mother and molded into a State-sanctioned machine.

Xiaojian continues, “In the intelligence world, professional relationships mimic the personal up to the point of utility. No so for Alexander. Our world beat him down for it, and he lost his way.”

To Gaby, fifteen years sober sounded like he’d gained it back and then some.

Reading her expression, Xiaojian nods in agreement. “He had self-discipline. More critically, he had people who cared for more than his utility, then and today. UNCLE would not exist were it not for Alexander’s personal relationships.”

A wash of bitter hypocrisy washes over Gaby, as it has threatened to do several times during the evening. She holds in as much as she can while measuring out, “For forty-five days, the importance of professionalism has been pressed upon me with great force. Tonight we are a family. You see how this sends a mixed message.”

“Yes,” Xiaojian says and waits.

Several seconds later, it dawns on Gaby that she was so braced for a didactic she completely missed that she was engaged in a conversation. Blinking, she offers, “Well, I think it’s splitting hairs, personal and professional. Or sexual and romantic,” she adds, ready at a moment’s notice to poke holes in the absurdities of the Code of Conduct. “Any relationship is bound to be messy.”

Xiaojian nods as if this observation is a grave truth she has long suspected. Far from the first time, Gaby wonders about the extent of her relationship with Waverley. In a quieter life, Xiaojian might have been a philosopher; a gleam of interest her eye, she says, “Then there is the problem of forgiveness. One might forgive a friend a flaw more readily than a colleague. But forgive a colleague a betrayal more readily than a friend.”

“One might,” Gaby can only echo, fingers finding the outline of the ring again.

“Balance and harmony,” Xiaojian muses. “Difficult to achieve untested. There will be much more to forgive.” Said with utter calm, but Gaby hears the threat and warning behind it. “I hope you enjoyed your celebration,” she says, exiting the conversation so quickly Gaby is left with no clue whether to feel reprimanded or honored by it.

What she does feel is unsettled. Illya’s ring hangs heavy around her neck, a weight and a promise both.


End file.
